A guest lecture in the Master’s Degree in Marketing and Communication at the University of Barcelona, moving from inspirational and thought-provoking questions about social media’s place in daily life to defining a coherent social media strategy, and finally to the tactics and tools used to activate it.
University of Barcelona, Master in Marketing and Communication
Thought-provoking questions about how social media shapes our daily lives.
Turning reflection into a clear, defensible social media strategy
Hands-on platforms, workflows and tools for activation.
I was invited back to the Master’s Degree in Marketing and Communication at the University of Barcelona for a session on social media, structured in three levels: the inspirational and thought-provoking questions that sit underneath every platform decision, the strategic thinking that turns those questions into a plan, and the tactical, tool-based work that gets a strategy live.
We opened with the uncomfortable questions first: what social media is actually doing to attention, relationships and identity, and why a brand’s presence on these platforms is never neutral. Students left with more questions than answers, which was the point, before we can ask what a brand should post.
From there we moved into strategy definition: positioning, audience definition, content pillars, and the objectives a social media presence is actually meant to serve, tied back to business goals rather than vanity metrics.
The final layer was tactics and tools: scheduling and publishing platforms, analytics dashboards, paid social activation, and the practical workflows that turn a strategy document into a content calendar that ships every week.
“Can we call it social media channel?”
Victor de la Fuente
Fifteen-plus years running social media and eCommerce strategy sit directly behind this course: the same discipline of moving from reflection to strategy to tactics is what turns a brand’s social presence into a channel that actually drives revenue, not just impressions.
Leading eCommerce and social media strategy, now translated into a hands-on university curriculum.
Most of the social media failures I see aren’t tactical, they’re philosophical: teams pick platforms and content formats before they’ve asked what role social media is meant to play in the business or in a person’s day. Skipping the reflective and strategic layers doesn’t make execution faster, it just moves the confusion downstream into a content calendar full of posts with no real objective.
AI tools now make it trivial to produce huge volumes of social content, which raises the stakes on getting the strategy right first. The teams that will pull ahead are the ones that use AI to execute a clear strategy faster, not the ones that use it to disguise the absence of one.
More public apparaences from Victor de la Fuente: Teaching & Speaking
